Book Review: Military missions in democratic Latin America

• Date: 01 July 2018
• Author: Maiah Jaskoski
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17728268
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Pion-Berlin, D. (2016). Military missions in democratic Latin America. New York, NY: Palgrave

Macmillan. 218 pp. $105 (hardcover), ISBN: 9781137592699

Reviewed by: Maiah Jaskoski, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17728268

In Military Missions in Democratic Latin America, David Pion-Berlin develops a

new paradigm for understanding missions of Latin America’s armed forces and the

implications of those missions. The book analyzes regional trends and efficiently

selected comparisons of country-level cases to successfully (1) explain why Latin

American militaries perform the missions they do, (2) assess the degree to which the

armed forces confront threats without harming innocent civilians, and (3) trace the

effects of missions on civilian control of the armed forces and military profession-

alism. Throughout the study, Pion-Berlin emphasizes the pragmatism of political

leaders, bureaucratic and professional characteristics of modern militaries, and gov-

ernment oversight of the armed forces at the political and operational levels.

The dominant framework for understanding military missions in the region has

been that put forth by Stepan (1973), who elegantly showed how military partici-

pation in counterinsurgency led armed forces to govern for extended periods of time

in the 1960s–1980s. This 1973 work is less helpful for understanding relationships

between missions and the politicization of the armed forces in the region’s current,

stable democracies, as Pion-Berlin demonstrates. Military Missions in Democratic

Latin America finds that military engagement in internal missions does not neces-

sarily pose challenges for democracy today.

An early chapter on external defense grounds the analysis. It shows that in recent

decades, Latin American armed forces overall have not seriously prepared for or

engaged in international warfare. Pion -Berlin attributes this dynamic to choices

made by politicians who have avoided escalating international conflict against an

historical backdrop of colonial rule, which by drawing borders dramatically reduced

the motive for postindependence interstate warfare. Military governments’ common

enemy of communism in the 1980s and moves toward regional security cooperation

in the 1990s have also reduced the possibility of interstate violence.

With the armed forces unoccupied by external defense, practical politicians have

ordered militaries to participate in various internal missions. For instance, political

leaders—attuned to criminal gangs and arms and drug traffickers too powerful to be

Armed Forces & Society

2018, Vol. 44(3) 555-560

ªThe Author(s) 2017

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